The Toronto Star, among others, is in an Olympic swoon. “This is an opportunity that mustn’t be missed,” the editorial board insists. “We can do this. We can seize the moment,” said one columnist. Another suggested we now face a “dilemma”: Do we bid for the 2024 Olympics, or Expo 2025, or both? “On Monday morning (after the Pan Am closing ceremonies), people will wake up in a euphoric state … and be willing to cast a thought for, ‘What would it be like for us to put on the Olympics Games?’ ” Vancouver Olympic head honcho John Furlong effused to the National Post’s Sean Fitz-Gerald. Deep breaths, everyone. Please. There’s nothing wrong with some misty-eyed boosterism. The problem is that it’s fertile soil for nonsense.

As ever, the boosters tell tales of a turbocharged economy, of a soaring international reputation, of fending off future tourists and conventioneers with pointy sticks. But those Olympic outcomes certainly aren’t the rule, nor are they predictable in advance or easy to measure dispassionately after the fact — and as we all know (bonjour, Montreal; kalimera, Athens), the risks are enormous. The boosters often mention Vancouver’s Games as a model, but the city has enjoyed no measurable increase in tourism or reputation. It did get $7 billion in “free” new infrastructure, including the Canada Line — but there is no good reason it couldn’t have been built regardless, and the Olympics certainly offered no discount.

The Pan Am Games, meanwhile, have transported us into a new land of make-believe. CBC reports “several new (Pan Am) facilities … could house future Olympic competitions, such as a velodrome and multiple swimming pools.” The IOC is far more amenable to using existing venues and to less grandiose visions, we are told. An unnamed source told The Globe and Mail we might satisfy delegates with a temporary 100,000-seat Olympic Stadium “that would not cost millions of dollars.”

The risks of a last-minute bid are huge; panic is not cheap

Needless to say, there is no stadium, temporary or permanent, that doesn’t cost millions of dollars. The IOC will always prefer permanent. And Toronto has no earthly need of such a facility. The Pan Am organizers have always been frank: Their facilities are not designed for the Olympics. The 2,500-seat velodrome in Milton is half the capacity of the one planned for Rio de Janeiro in 2016. The aquatics centre in Scarborough seats 6,000; those in Rio, London and Beijing seat more than 17,000. It’s not even close.

And then there is the timeline to consider. Publicly, Mayor John Tory has been making the right noises: Let’s not go food shopping while we’re starving, as he aptly put it. But the dinner bell is ringing. When city staff reported on Toronto 2024 to the dconomic development committee, they stressed how “constrained” the timeline was. That was 19 months ago. “There is not enough time to wait until after the (2014 municipal) elections and the holding of the (Pan Am) Games in 2015 to decide whether to bid,” they warned. And here we are.

If the committee wanted to proceed, staff suggested spending the spring and summer of 2014 preparing a “detailed business plan,” consulting with the public and seeking corporate sponsorships, concurrently undertaking months of negotiations with the provincial and federal governments and then slapping it down in front of city council for approval — all to meet a Sept. 15, 2015, deadline to declare our interest. As the committee voted not to pursue the bid, none of that has happened. Boston’s bid, abandoned this week over fiscal concerns, had been a going concern for almost two years. City council doesn’t even meet again before the deadline.

Perhaps it’s possible for Toronto to secure Olympic-size commitments from Ottawa and Queen’s Park in a matter of six weeks, and then cobble together a reasonably coherent basic bid in time for the next deadline, which is in January. But it wouldn’t be a bid in which Torontonians could feel managerially and fiscally confident. The risks of a last-minute bid are huge; panic is not cheap. Many of the infrastructure commitments likely to ride on that bid — notably a Downtown Relief Line and Port Lands development — are not costed. There’s no doubt mega-events can provoke action on long-neglected priorities. But look at Toronto’s waterfront: For ages it was hitched to Olympic bids and then we lost and redeveloped it anyway. This is definitely an opportunity we can afford to miss.

I’ll admit it. For all the IOC’s bombast and corruption and hypocrisy, I enjoy the Olympics immensely. And I would be happy for Toronto to host them some day — not as a sound economic investment, however, but as a big, bold statement that we think this place is pretty great and we want to show off for a few weeks. That’s what even the most economically successful Olympics are really about. The jobs and tourism and international goodwill arguments are just talking points, and should be treated as such during the frantic discussion we’re suddenly having. Beware boosters bearing gifts.

Norm Kelly might be Toronto’s best-liked city councillor at the moment. And that’s really quite odd, because by the standards of Toronto’s excitable left-wing politics-watchers, he ought to be a villain. In his two decades on Metro and then City Council, the Scarborough councillor has suggested shutting down the streetcar system; defended budget cuts for school playground equipment and to multicultural groups; dismissed calls for a “cosmetic” pesticide ban (correctly) for lack of evidence, boasting his lawn was “99.9 per cent grass”; staunchly supported police chief Julian Fantino against his progressive critics; and suggested climate change, if real — if — might benefit Toronto’s tree canopy. That was all before he hitched his wagon to the Rob Ford agenda, including as his second deputy mayor.

How is this man even somewhat popular? His performance as interim mayor once Ford finally went away certainly took a lot of the edges off his reputation — and it wasn’t just the low bar he had to clear. In public, Kelly turned an enthusiastic, friendly, competent face to the city and beyond, and he reportedly did likewise in his dealings with fellow councillors. But it’s on Twitter, for whatever that’s worth, that he has really remade his reputation.

Overheard someone use 'on fleek' today. Checked the definition.
i.e. My garden will be on fleek after I clean it up http://t.co/0wMwMbzDmZ

On the 140-character social media site, he exhibits a sort of whimsy, humour, spontaneity and good-natured banter that’s very out of keeping with the popular caricature of flinty fiscal conservatives, and very rare in politics in general. Assuming he writes his own tweets — and he says that he does — this 73-year-old former Upper Canada College history teacher has become an unlikely master of the medium.

For the unfamiliar: Kelly’s feed contains standard political missives — a warning not to leave your dogs in hot cars; updates on the number of potholes filled. But it also features many of the tropes that tend to dominate Twitter conversation among much younger people. There are random, exasperated, sometimes self-deprecating observations about modern life: “Why do people leave voicemail? It’s 2015. Text me.” “That watery ketchup which comes out the bottle before the real stuff sucks. It’s 2015, someone do something about it.” There are faux-indignant interactions with corporate Twitter handles: Kelly once furiously demanded to know why Reese’s peanut butter-chocolate spread wasn’t available; several months later a photo showed him delighted at a Reese’s care package, then another showed him devouring a jar at his desk.

And Kelly seems to understand the sort of collective absurdity that often drives Twitter phenomena. When a tongue-in-cheek memorial to a dead raccoon sprang up at the corner of Yonge and Church, Kelly christened him “Conrad” and invented a friendship with the anthropomorphized mammal: there was a “photo” of the two together at a baseball game. At times he adopts the persona of an excitable civic booster: “Yo, @Drake. What the hell is this?” he asked of a photo in which the hometown rapper exchanged courtside pleasantries with a Washington Wizards player after a Raptors playoff loss.

And fittingly, he waded into the bewildering rap battle surrounding the Pan Am closing ceremonies, which were headlined by Kanye West — an American, to many Torontonians’ horror. “What if it was Bieber instead,” Kelly wondered, trenchantly, aloud. “Just listened to (ceremonies performer) Pitbull for the first time,” he announced the next day. “Wonder if we’re focusing our attention on the wrong guy.” Suddenly Kelly was a hip-hop critic. When Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill accused Drake of not “writing his own raps,” Kelly declared him persona non grata in Toronto. It was retweeted a fairly astonishing 130,000 times. “U sound like a thug lol,” Meek Mill responded.

The whole thing is an intriguing rebranding exercise, and there are no doubt lessons here for the PR industry. But it might be more than that. In Canadian politics, where small differences are often afforded massive importance, it is all too tempting to villainize one’s partisan or ideological opponents. It helps if you can believe they’re awful people who delight in the pain and misery their policies inflict on people. It’s far more difficult, of course, if you know them.

For politicians who are real-life jerks, Twitter offers them rope with which to hang themselves. That’s a useful service for voters. Kelly demonstrates another one: He is demonstrating that no matter what you might think of his political leanings, his heart is in the right place. If voters know that behind the ideas and policies they dislike, there is a real live human being doing his best in the pursuit of what he thinks is right, not only would our politics be better; those ideas and policies might not seem quite so scary after all.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/toronto/chris-selley-norm-kellys-twitter-renaissance-a-lesson-for-all-politicians/feed2stdnorm-kelly-pChris Selley: Time for Torontonians and their governments to get serious about streetcarshttp://news.nationalpost.com/toronto/chris-selley-time-for-torontonians-and-their-governments-to-get-serious-about-streetcars
http://news.nationalpost.com/toronto/chris-selley-time-for-torontonians-and-their-governments-to-get-serious-about-streetcars#commentsFri, 24 Jul 2015 15:28:30 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=835954

If the Great Pyramid of Giza had come in three inches taller than its intended height, its reputed architect, Hemon, might reasonably have petitioned pharaoh for mercy. None is owed the contractor who somehow managed to lay concrete foundations for new streetcar tracks on Leslie Street, between Queen Street and Eastern Avenue, that were three inches too tall, which necessitated tearing them up and starting again, subjecting that poor neighbourhood to yet more dust, noise, stress and loss of business.

It was a mind-boggling screw-up that will come at no cost to taxpayers, we are assured, but at some excess cost to Leslievillians’ collective sanity.

It’s been nearly 17 months since they started tearing up Leslie Street. We learned this week of another delay: it will be mid-August before Leslie is open to traffic, and the end of September before streetcars will be rolling from Queen Street south into the gargantuan new Leslie Barns. That will put the project — dead simple, on its face; a few hundred metres of streetcar track on flat terrain — nearly a year behind schedule and wildly over budget. To be fair, much of the cost overrun involves replacing water mains. In no defensible budgeting process should water mains come as a surprise, however.

Toronto Transit Commission spokesman Brad Ross says the agency is bound and determined to learn lessons from this and every other project. But at root, he says, “we are a transit operator. We deliver transit to the City of Toronto. … There has been discussion amongst some that perhaps there’s going to come a point where the TTC’s focus should remain solely on operations, and perhaps others should be delivering these projects in the future.”

“That’s a political decision,” he observes. Indeed. It’s one well worth considering.

Laura Pedersen/National PostIt will be the end of September before streetcars will be rolling from Queen Street south into the gargantuan new Leslie Barns.

That said, the TTC’s bad project management reputation is not entirely its own fault. It serves a peculiar clientele, by which I mean Torontonians, and operates under governments for which speed and efficiency are by no means priorities. On St. Clair, it faced downright unhinged opposition from residents and businesses, and a bizarre court injunction ordering it to down tools; on the Spadina subway extension, an Ontario Ministry of Labour investigation saw work stop for an utterly preposterous four months. City council can’t stick to a decision to save its life and we cheer them on: a Toronto Star editorial this week called for returning to the Scarborough LRT plan. Rotating subway closures are finally addressing years of underfunding and neglect, and we complain like mad.

And when it comes to streetcars, we haven’t given ourselves the tools to succeed. Caught between those who love streetcars and those who despise them, we’ve bashed out a compromise-infected network that doesn’t run nearly as smoothly as it could. The TTC has gradually expanded signal priority for streetcars — i.e., operators can extend green lights and in some cases advanced greens, allowing left-turning cars to clear the way. But it’s absurd to hold up a public transit vehicle so private vehicles can turn left in the first place. It’s equally absurd to allow parking along routes where streetcars compete with traffic. A child could do the math.

Other progress has been made: rear-door boarding, towing illegally parked cars during rush hour. (What a concept!) Others sit on the shelf. There are nine stops on King Street between Bathurst and Yonge. Nine! In two kilometres! For decades we’ve talked about closing King Street downtown to traffic, at least at rush hour — a fine idea, in my view, but goodness knows there are easier, less politically radioactive improvements available in the meantime. (I say that now. Just wait until the first teary deputation from Save the Simcoe Streetcar Stop.)

None of these are my own ideas; they’re out there in the wild, just waiting to be adopted. The single best argument for streetcars over buses is that they carry far more people from A to B. Well, not when they’re stuck in traffic, they don’t. In honour of the long-suffering residents of Leslie Street, let’s finally get serious. Hate streetcars? Bully for you; they’re not going away. It helps no one not to make the best of them.

The Liberals are said to be redeploying artillery to their left flank, where Thomas Mulcair and his New Democrats have for now usurped the title of Progressive Alternative in the polls. Notably, all and Grit sundry have been demanding to know why the NDP “wants to make it easier for Quebec to leave Canada,” or words to that effect, by replacing the Clarity Act with what the party calls the Unity Bill.

Related

The legislation would enshrine “the majority of valid votes” on a clear question in a sovereignty referendum as the threshold for triggering constitutional negotiations, replacing the Clarity Act’s “clear majority.” The latter is language taken straight from the Supreme Court’s 1998 reference on the secession of Quebec: “that a clear majority of Quebecers votes on a clear question in favour of secession” will necessitate negotiations. Absent that majority, the Clarity Act stipulates, the federal government cannot enter into such discussions.

The Supreme Court’s reference is not as clear as it could be on what it means by “clear majority”: at times, it doesn’t seem to rule out that 50 per cent plus one could be sufficient; at other times it seems like the word “clear” can’t mean anything unless it’s more than that. By virtue of its simplicity, perhaps, it’s this issue that gets all the press. As many have noted, Holyrood and Westminster agreed on 50 per cent plus one for the Scottish referendum. But you’ll find no support in this column for betting the country on a one-vote majority.

You also won’t find much worry, however. As an example of a clear question, the Unity Act proposes: “Should Quebec become a sovereign country?” There has never been a prospect of 50 per cent minus five support for such a question in Quebec, never mind plus one, and it’s doubtful there ever will be. (The Unity Act does vouchsafe “any question the wording of which has been the subject of an agreement between the Government of Canada and the Government of Quebec. But that’s only scary if you believe Mulcair is some kind of stealth separatist, which is one of the very stupidest theories currently on offer in Canadian politics.)

It’s mass delusion, and the NDP are reinforcing it. The Supreme Court reference could not be any clearer that Quebec cannot legally secede from Canada unilaterally.

The Unity Bill is worrying for more complex reasons. One, it only concerns Quebec, whereas the Clarity Act applies, as it should, to all provinces. Two, it authorizes the Quebec Court of Appeal to rule on the disputed clarity of a referendum question, rather than properly leaving it to political actors. And three, having noted in its preamble the “obligation on all parties to Confederation to negotiate constitutional changes” in the event of a clear yes vote, it relegates to the “clarifications” section of the bill any mention of parties other than the governments of Canada and Quebec. This bolsters the preamble’s declaration that “the Quebec nation has the right to democratically decide its own future.”

It is here that the NDP can be most fairly criticized for pandering to Quebec voters — though by no means just separatist or hard-nationalist ones. A 2013 Harris-Decima poll found 57 per cent support among Quebecers for the Unity Bill; every other region was firmly opposed. No party in the National Assembly supports the Clarity Act. Each speaks as if Quebec can go ahead and separate if it wants to. “I have always said that the future of Quebec will be decided in Quebec by the Québécois,” Liberal Premier Philippe Couillard said in the dying days of the 2014 election campaign. It’s mass delusion, and the NDP are reinforcing it. The Supreme Court reference could not be any clearer that Quebec cannot legally secede from Canada unilaterally.

As the Unity Bill acknowledges, a sovereignty referendum seeks nothing more or less than a constitutional amendment, and there’s nothing in the constitution about referendums. All parties to confederation would be obligated to respond in good faith to a clearly expressed desire for said amendment, the court ruled. But “while the negotiators would have to contemplate the possibility of secession, there would be no absolute legal entitlement to it and no assumption that an agreement reconciling all relevant rights and obligations would actually be reached,” the court wrote. “It is foreseeable that even negotiations carried out in conformity with the underlying constitutional principles could reach an impasse.”

No kidding. There have been two notable constitutional impasses involving Quebec in recent decades.

It is a delicate operation the Liberals are undertaking here: trying to make hay on the NDP’s purported weakness on federalism without angering Quebec voters who think as Couillard does. On the list of things that would give me pause about voting NDP, national unity isn’t even in the top 10. And I suspect that’s the case for a great many Canadians who are happy, at least for now, to see Quebec remain part of Canada.

To my mind, the New Democrats are far more vulnerable on another big-ticket item that the Liberals are focusing on: the party’s incredibly audacious pledge to institute mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) for the 2019 federal election. No committee to study various kinds of electoral reform, as the Liberals have proposed; and no referendum, as Ontario and British Columbia have held in the past on proportional representation. They’ll just do it.

“If we seek that mandate and gain that mandate, we will see that as an opportunity to affect the voting system,” MP Nathan Cullen told the Georgia Straight in a recent interview. “Canadians weren’t consulted when first-past-the-post was brought in. It was just done. We’ve never been consulted since. We’re going to do something a lot more democratic and fair.”

Points for candour — we can’t say we weren’t warned. And even more points for guts — MMP has a nasty habit of infuriating people. It is vulnerable to charges it bolsters the power of political parties: one still votes for one’s preferred constituency MP, but one also votes for one’s preferred party, which provides a list of candidates to be sprinkled in amongst local MPs to ensure the seat tally reflects the popular vote. The NDP claims its preferred system avoids these pitfalls by allowing voters either to endorse the party list or to choose someone on the list over the others — but those MPs would still be beholden chiefly to the party, even more so than our MPs already are.

A 2010 Environics poll found great support for proportional representation as a concept: 63 per cent in favour and just 30 per cent opposed nationally. But the devil is in the details of the system. Stripped of the aforementioned subtleties in election debates and advertising, MMP must have considerable potential to backfire on the NDP. In 2010, 63 per cent of Ontarians told Environics they supported proportional representation; three years earlier, the exact same number voted against MMP in a referendum. Only five ridings were in favour, in all of which the federal NDP are already elected or competitive.

There’s nothing undemocratic about the NDP’s pledge, and it’s great that we’re talking about electoral reform (though I don’t support any form of proportional representation in the House of Commons). But considering the result in Ontario, turning MMP specifically into a ballot question seems not just politically risky but far from ideal procedurally. A national vote would be a referendum, for once, that everyone should welcome.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/chris-selley-the-liberals-are-missing-the-mark-the-ndps-real-weaknesses-dont-lie-with-the-unity-bill/feed0stdUntitled-1Chris Selley: Toronto stuck with governments that think local when many major problems are regionalhttp://news.nationalpost.com/toronto/chris-selley-toronto-stuck-with-governments-that-think-local-when-many-major-problems-are-regional
http://news.nationalpost.com/toronto/chris-selley-toronto-stuck-with-governments-that-think-local-when-many-major-problems-are-regional#commentsTue, 21 Jul 2015 21:59:37 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=832644

One of the more interesting moments in city council’s debate over the casino expansion at Woodbine came when Coun. Anthony Perruzza lamented voting in favour of legalizing casino gambling in the first place. It was a fitting reminder of a fairly hard-and-fast rule of Canadian politics: no matter what a politician might have thought or said in the past, in a fiscal emergency he will opt to expand gambling. It was Bob Rae’s NDP government, in which Perruzza was a backbencher, that introduced casino gambling to Ontario, and the debate then sounded exactly like it sounds now.

“I don’t think it’s a big deal” was Rae’s position. “We’ve had gaming in the province in a variety of ways — bingo, horse racing and the lotteries.” “The people of Ontario must not be subjected to Las Vegas-style fiscal planning,” countered Liberal MPP Joe Cordiano. Tory leader Mike Harris argued it would create jobs at the expense of other jobs. “I don’t want the money,” he said.

Needless to say, no Tory or Liberal government since has backed us away from games of chance. At the council debate, the right and the left had exchanged places precisely from 20 years ago at Queen’s Park.

Think regional? We can’t even get our act together in the 416

The contrast highlights some of the strengths and weaknesses of party and non-party political systems. Parties limit dissenting opinions, including valid ones about casinos. But, in turn, they force their members to consider the jurisdiction in question as a whole, in practical terms. It was one thing for downtown councillors to nix a casino on Front Street; they knew some other kind of development would happen there instead. It was quite another for them to say no to Woodbine, a big empty space in an economically disadvantaged area, knowing full well the Ontario Lottery & Gaming Corp. intends to open new slots and tables somewhere in the Toronto area anyway.

In a party system, councillors could never have got away with waving away hundreds of potential new unionized positions as “bad jobs,” or arguing against them on grounds we could brag to other cities about being casino-free. They would bring scorn and contempt upon their fellows; for better or worse, they would be answerable to people beyond their constituents. The Woodbine debate, by contrast, showed yet again how utterly unaccountable city councillors are except to their own patch of the city — not that we needed reminding. Just wait until the Scarborough subway-vs.-LRT debate comes back on the boil.

That’s a problem within a much bigger problem: so many of our major issues are regional, not local, and the region’s governments all operate more or less the same way. It’s tough to imagine Metro Vancouver’s failed transit referendum, which proposed billions of transportation investments across the region, faring much better here. But it couldn’t even have happened here, because there is no jurisdiction comparable to Metro Vancouver. You still hear people talk about de-amalgamating Toronto; had the Woodbine vote gone the other way, it’s likely we’d have heard still more. But the trend needs to be in precisely the opposite direction.

In a recent report, the Fraser Institute reminds us that the effects of de-amalgamation are as difficult to predict, and the benefits as difficult to achieve, as the effects of amalgamation, few of which panned out. De-amalgamated Montreal is a democratic Rube Goldberg machine, with four levels of governance sharing various members; it’s a wonder they know where to be every morning. That’s no model, and while some kind of Greater Toronto Area-wide council makes all kinds of sense in theory, it is neither a foolproof nor a likely solution.

You need look no further than the Pan Am Games for proof we can grab the bull by the horns when we need to: we decided certain people needed reliable vehicular transportation across the GTA, so we created temporary high-occupancy lanes. Many howled, some cheated, and many adapted: Metrolinx reported a surge in usage of its online carpooling service; others used Uber’s timely new carpooling app. Were we to keep those HOV lanes, those options would remain available to all of us. And if we finally admitted what all the research shows — that only pricing everyone’s road usage fights gridlock — we could start tackling this tomorrow.

But no. The athletes will go home, the signs will come down, and the sad slow farce will resume for want of rowers and mountain bikers to move around. Think regional? We can’t even get our act together in the 416. In a 2013 Munk School paper, Enid Slack and Richard Bird described amalgamated Toronto as “too small to address the regional issues that plague the GTA … and too big to be very responsive to local residents.” From Woodbine’s undeveloped acres to the stationary Don Valley Parkway, that has never seemed more apt than it does today. And salvation does not seem near at hand.

The interim report from Mayor John Tory’s Task Force on Toronto Community Housing released last week made headlines for Tory’s demand that “thugs … engaged in criminal acts” be purged from TCHC buildings, and that the security situation be brought under control within six months. “I think most people would conclude that if you used precious public housing as a base for drug dealing you forfeit the right to live there,” said the mayor.

Well, who could argue? Making thugs homeless isn’t likely to turn their lives around, but nobody should have to live next door to them.

So kick them out, by all means. Let’s just not pretend it’s any kind of solution for buildings or neighbourhoods or TCHC. In the main the security problem isn’t TCHC’s fault; there’s nothing going on in any of its buildings that can’t or doesn’t go on in privately owned neighbouring ones. (There’s a three-bed/two-bath condo listed at 320 Dixon Road — made famous by a certain former mayor and some police raids — for $108,000.) In the main the problem is what it always is: insufficient education, employment, income and hope, substance abuse, drug prohibition, broken families. As those indicators improve, so do apartment buildings.

The task force report doesn’t actually mention evictions; rather it stresses that “drug dealers and others engaging in illegal activity on TCHC property must get the message that they will not be permitted to continue to disrupt the lives of residents.” It’s full of wiffly stuff like that. To wit, it recommends “that the 10-year capital repair program as planned while the city continues to seek fair-share funding from the federal and provincial governments.” Translation: there’s a $2.6 billion repair backlog; it’s currently funded only to the tune of $865 million from the city; so let’s keep asking our friends in Ottawa and at Queen’s Park for the additional $1.735 billion.

People are begging to be able to live in even TCHC’s worst buildings, because it’s all they can afford

And the task force is quite right: the solution to $2.6 billion in needed repairs is $2.6 billion and some repairers. There’s nothing wrong with the report, wiffly as it is. Essentially it recommends TCHC investigate opportunities to explore avenues along which might lie strategies useful in overcoming obstacles to being a better bloody landlord. It’s just that whatever else it needs to do on the periphery, at the core it needs wads of money and it has no way to raise it.

There were an astonishing 78,392 households on the waiting list for rent-geared-to-income (RGI) housing in 2014, according to the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association (ONPHA). The average wait times are like something out of dystopian fiction: five years for seniors, six-and-a-half for singles and couples, 8.4 years for families. People are begging to be able to live in even TCHC’s worst buildings, because it’s all they can afford. It’s a long-running disgrace, and apathy is too often the reaction among the wider public.

In a report released this month, the ONPHA suggested a fairly radical overhaul of the way public housing subsidies are delivered in Ontario. As it stands, eligibility — i.e., the applicants’ income level — is determined using laborious documentation and verification processes that are a huge administrative burden for housing providers and governments and often a serious challenge for tenants. When tenants’ employment patterns fluctuate, so does the subsidy. It means neither they nor their providers can budget properly, says ONPHA executive director Sharad Kerur. He argues we ought simply to measure applicants’ income using their tax returns, as we do for any number of other government benefits, and make rents more stable and predictable.

And then, the real revolution: portable subsidies.

“If you need to transition because a job is waiting for you in another community, you shouldn’t have to leave that subsidy behind,” says Kerur. The socioeconomic benefits of the American federal Section 8 portable housing subsidy are not universally accepted, and when its implementation fails it can fail in ways that look a lot like public housing failures. But for “individuals who want to improve their livelihood but can’t do it within their community,” says Kerur, “at least they don’t sacrifice their subsidy.”

Indeed. People who finally land a TCHC unit very seldom give it up; imagine starting right down at the bottom of the pile again! And the idea works within cities and individual neighbourhoods, too: if we can’t give people safe and clean and functional homes to go with their subsidized rent, how can we possibly justify effectively trapping them in those homes?

Peel, Halton and Kingston have in recent years implemented portable subsidies for some recipients, grabbing people off the waiting list and steering them towards private-sector vacancies. A somewhat similar program in Toronto subsidizes just 2,900 units — and expanding it would be much easier said than done in this city, with its 1.8 per cent vacancy rate. The central need in Toronto is for more housing, period. But in the meantime, if fed up TCHC tenants can find a way to make their subsidy work for them on the open market, we ought to let them. Either that, or we need to fix their damn apartments already. Asking Stephen Harper and Kathleen Wynne for cash is not what you’d call a foolproof plan.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/toronto/chris-selley-fix-tchc-apartments-or-set-the-tenants-free/feed0stdTCHCChris Selley: The best city to be a woman is the one in which everybody is equally poorhttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/chris-selley-the-best-city-to-be-a-woman-is-the-one-in-which-everybody-is-equally-poor
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/chris-selley-the-best-city-to-be-a-woman-is-the-one-in-which-everybody-is-equally-poor#commentsFri, 17 Jul 2015 13:14:50 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=828191

There are certain measures of female achievement, certain indicators of female-friendly societies, that we can probably all agree are reasonable: equal pay for equal work; corporate and political cultures that are at least considerably less male-dominated than ours; equality of outcomes in health and security and happiness; equality, indeed, in general. The global community of NGOs and think tanks remains determined to complicate matters, however; and, which is a much bigger problem, the media persist in reporting on their various tables and rankings in an alarmingly credulous and slapdash fashion. It really should stop.

The latest absurdities stem from a report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, titled “The Best and Worst Places to Be a Woman in Canada: The Gender Gap in Canada’s 25 Biggest Cities,” and from reams of ensuing media coverage from those cities. Among other things, we learned that the second-worst place to be a woman in Canada might just be … Edmonton? That lefty bastion, dripping with oily wealth and bursting at the seams with government jobs?

The very same. Let’s have a look at where the Festival City struggled, shall we? The big problems were relatively high levels of police-reported violence against women; relatively low levels of female representation in politics and senior management; a poor score on education (more on this below); and a woeful third-last showing on “economic security.”

The latter is the distillation of four factors: the employment rate, the full-time employment rate, the number of people living below the low-income measure after tax, and the median employment income, each expressed in terms of equality between men and women. Of the 25 cities measured, Edmonton finished 19th, 14th, 18th and 24th, respectively — which is to say that in each category there was a relatively large gap between male and female outcomes.

Does that make Edmonton a “bad place to be a woman”?

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Before answering, you may want to consider that at time of measurement, only three cities (Calgary, Gatineau, Regina) had a higher female employment rate; that only one city (Regina) had a higher full-time female employment rate; that only women in Calgary, Regina, Ottawa and Gatineau had a higher median employment income; and that fewer women in Edmonton (and Calgary, tied) live below the low-income line than in any other city in Canada. (Calgary finished third-last in the rankings, overall.)

In other words, if you’re a person who cares about things like having a full-time job and money, and not being poor, you might say that Edmonton is one of the very best places to be a woman in Canada. Inequality matters, absolutely. But rational human beings, advised of said Edmontonian inequalities, would consider them against other priorities. For example, they might measure London, Ont.’s, first-place score on economic matters against the fact that its employment and full-time employment rates for women are nine and 11 points lower, respectively, than Edmonton’s; that the median female income earner makes almost $5,000 less than in Edmonton; and that more than three times as many women live under the low-income measure than in Edmonton.

If you’re a person who cares about things like having a full-time job and money, and not being poor, you might say that Edmonton is one of the very best places to be a woman

Indeed, more women — and men — live below said measure in London than in any other city in Canada. Other than median employment income, where it’s in the middle of the pack, London is near the bottom of the pile on every single economic indicator for women. But men and women take it on the chin relatively equally, so it does well in the ranking. Indeed it gets bonus points, because it’s one of the few cities where men as a group are poorer than women — just as a city where 10 per cent more women than men had bachelor’s degrees would be bested by a city where 15 per cent more women had BAs. Unsurprisingly, given recent post-secondary trends, women do better than under the CCPA’s education measure in almost every Canadian city. But in the progressive world, some inequalities are more equal than others.

There’s nothing wrong with the underlying data here. Inequality matters, as I say — though curiously enough the study doesn’t measure inequality on the all-important issue of security; far more usefully, it measures police-reported victimization rates … but only of women. The study provides the raw numbers in each city-specific section; hopefully no one will fire up the U-Haul and head off in search of equality only to wind up poorer, sicker and less safe. But the rankings are of highly dubious utility except inasmuch as they draw news editors’ attention — and the results, in the main, are useful as nothing other than clickbait. It is difficult to see what good can come of suggesting to Canadians that some cities in which women empirically thrive are in fact “bad places to be a woman,” and that some cities in which women empirically struggle are “good places to be a woman.”

The utterly compelling opening ceremonies for the 2012 London Olympics featured music by, among many others, the Fuck Buttons, the Sex Pistols, Dizzee Rascal, the Happy Mondays, Amy Winehouse, Muse, Tinie Tempah and U2.

If London were Toronto and the playlist were known in advance, I imagine it would have been subject to nuclear-powered whinging from multiple fronts over the artists being some combination of profane, sexist, drug-addled, poor role models, utterly ridiculous and Irish. Vancouver’s opening ceremonies were more our speed, let’s face it: Bryan Adams, Nelly Furtado, Sarah McLachlan, Joni Mitchell, Ashley MacIsaac, k.d. lang. Céline Dion would have been there had she not been pregnant.

People John Tory has probably heard of, in other words — unlike Kanye West, who the Pan Ams have landed for the closing ceremonies.

Asked about the booking Wednesday, Tory professed ignorance except to aver that Kanye was a “proud product” of the Toronto music scene. (A bad guess? Did he confuse him with someone else?) Informed of his error, Tory said he would have preferred a Canadian booking. On Thursday he capped off a remarkable 24 hours by releasing a bewildering video of himself riding the subway in a baseball cap (facing forward, thank God) listening (we are to assume) to Kanye and then ogling Kim Kardashian on the cover of Rolling Stone, a copy of which he had secreted within a free newspaper. (More on the video in a moment.)

I intend no swipe at Tory; it was a harmless gaffe. And it can’t honestly come as a surprise to the people of this city that the 61-year-old fine-old-Ontario-family former Rogers executive mayor we elected hadn’t heard of Kanye West. It’s better our mayors know nothing of music, frankly, lest they be tempted to form opinions about what we should be listening to.

The absurd anti-Kanye backlash that has since formed — nearly 19,000 names adorn an online petition deploring the booking — has little to do with Tory, however. It simply reveals, unfortunately, that we’re still pretty much the same city that banned the Barenaked Ladies from city hall property because their name objectified women. For all of our cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, a remarkably resilient streak of prissy busybodiness continues to pollute this city’s DNA.

Screen shotChris Selley writes 'John Tory capped off a remarkable 24 hours by releasing a bewildering video of himself riding the subway in a baseball cap (facing forward, thank God) listening (we are to assume) to Kanye and then ogling Kim Kardashian on the cover of Rolling Stone, a copy of which he had secreted within a free newspaper'

Comments on the petition chiefly object to Kanye’s unsporting behaviour at various award shows (“in no way does he represent the spirit of the games”) and his passport (though Cuban-American rapper Pitbull’s booking at the same event seems to have flown straight under the radar, for reasons I couldn’t possibly speculate about). You would think they had booked Andy Dick to sing the national anthem on Canada’s 150th birthday. You ask me for the definition of a Torontonian, I say it’s someone who could not give a damn about the Pan Am Games one second and be sincerely outraged about the closing ceremonies program in the next.

Tory’s video is clearly designed to lightheartedly defuse the situation, and it works … though not by a wide margin. He bops his head like he’s being remote-controlled (or is it purely affected, and he’s actually listening to Vivaldi?). There’s a look on his face as he ponders Kardashian’s portrait that’s best never discussed again. But in the end, I’d say it ends up being quite endearing: a nice older white man awkwardly making fun of himself in front of the kids, just as nice older white men have always done — not least on the subject of the rap music, with the hippin’ and the hoppin’.

I was reminded of a high school talent show in which two teachers blinged up and rapped about us students, one by one; it was all I could do not to run for the exit, but I smile looking back on it. If Torontonians as a group could be one quarter that unselfconscious, we would be better off for it.

If the Pan Am Games do nothing else for this city, it is to be hoped some of us might notice that at long last, and not without hiccups and massive expenditure, we are knocking the downtown renewal file out of the park. Wandering around the teeming Distillery District on Sunday, even the grumpy and gridlock-bound would have been hard pressed not to concede we have something spectacular on our hands there. From there to Corus Quay to Sugar Beach to Queen’s Quay West, we are reaping the benefits of decades of political toil and spending.

On Tuesday, Mayor John Tory, federal Finance Minister Joe Oliver and provincial Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid stood at the edge of the harbour, north of Cherry Beach, and announced their support, in principle, for what’s arguably the Holy Grail of waterfront redevelopment: turning the Lower Don Lands, our most benighted lakeside, into many hundreds of acres of multi-use development and parkland.

Waterfront Toronto has earmarked $5 million for “due diligence” on the approved plan: soil contamination studies, procurement issues and scheduling. And if a firm price is in the neighbourhood of the suspected $1 billion, the feds and Queen’s Park want you to know they’re interested in chipping in your money for it.

The renderings are nothing short of spectacular. The project would create a new waterway between the Keating and Shipping channels, just south of Commissioners Street, which would serve as the new mouth of the Don River. There is a utilitarian purpose: The Don currently ends unceremoniously in a 90-degree turn at the Keating Channel, which creates a flood risk to some 700 acres of downtown land. A more natural outflow will hugely mitigate that risk and make development a far more rational proposition. But that’s just a means to an end.

Waterfront TorontoAn artist’s rendering shows part of a plan to naturalize the mouth of the Don River and its adjacent lands in Toronto.

Tory called it “one of the most exciting things that lies before this city.” He’s dead right. And looking west along the waterfront from its arse end, even knowing how little an agreement in principle from a government is worth, it was difficult to muster the cynicism that traditionally attends megaproject announcements in Toronto.

“You need look no further than the (Pan Am) Athletes’ Village,” said Tory. “Twenty years ago it was a contaminated piece of land that nobody really wanted to talk about. … Today it is a thriving centre of activity … and several months from today it will be a thriving first-class neighbourhood.” It’s never quick, never cheap. We might quibble with parts of our improved waterfront. But no one, surely, would refund those improvements for the money spent.

I’m a year away from 40, and well accustomed to bitching about the pace of progress in this city; but the more I’ve thought about it recently, the more I’m amazed at how far we’ve come, and the less despondent I am about the timeline.

I dug up some promotional materials for Toronto’s 1996 Olympic bid this week. Considering how recent that is, the shots of the bleak, featureless waterfront — to be spiffed up, naturally, in preparation for the world’s arrival — were jaw-dropping. We didn’t get the Olympics, and we did it anyway. When I was a kid, the Don Valley was indeed a place you preferred not to think about — all the more so further downstream. The brickworks were a place you snuck into to … explore, let’s say. The Gooderham and Worts distillery was presumed to be a permanent derelict. Lore held any ravine or valley was full of violent hobos, child predators and worse. Commissioners Street was somewhere your dad taught you to drive, and I suppose it still is. But in 20 years it needn’t be.

It was probably a bit much, hauling the mayor and two ministers out for an announcement about “due diligence,” the results of which won’t be received until next year. “I have a real concern about past major projects in the public domain that have gone way over budget,” said Tory, “and so I think it’s good we should look at procurement and pricing and risk-assessment issues.” Well, no kidding. It’s called “due” diligence for a reason. But this is a chance for Torontonians to take a look at this project, which seems to have flown somewhat under the radar. A billion bucks is a billion bucks is a billion bucks. It’s their money. But I would be very surprised if they didn’t like what they saw.

It should come as no shock that the National Post’s Comment section is home to the occasional bunfight on the issues of the day. From early email-chain battles and passive-aggressive column asides, the Pundit Wars were born. Today, Toronto columnist Chris Selley squares off against Colby Cosh on the lofty, monumental matter of Mother Canada.

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Colby Cosh: I guess the idea here is for Chris and I to argue with each other about the proposed Never Forgotten National Memorial. Which won’t be easy, since he seems to have conceded most of the critiques I made last week. His piece is a giant “Yes, but”: “Mother Canada” may be tasteless, redundant, oddly situated, and a likely failure when considered as a piece of economic stimulus (“…it’s hard to believe many people are going to see this thing”), but its imagineers mean well. The idea of commemorating Canadian soldiers is great! It’s just the execution and everything about it that’s misguided and horrible!

Well, yes, Chris, we know memorializing Canada’s fallen soldiers is a good idea because as a country we have done rather a lot of it, mostly through modest monuments distributed across a couple thousand older towns and villages. I talked about those monuments last week: their virtue is that in most cases they represent personal grief for specific individuals.

That’s the Anglo-Saxon way of doing it, I think. The English-speaking world will sometimes erect big physical tributes to important individual geniuses like Lord Nelson. (Even on Nelson’s Column, though, the image of the man himself is human-scaled.) But most of the plus-sized war memorials one might compare to Mother Canada 2.0 —counting the one at Vimy, I guess we can go ahead and commission a tourist booklet called Canada Has Two Mommies — are to be found in the world of the old Soviet Bloc.

I do not mean that as a cheap shot: some Soviet-era public art is quite attractive. Some of the ostentatious public sculptures the Communist world is famous for depict soldiers at work. Some, like the famous super-statue on the Mamayev Kurgan in Stalingrad and her cousin in Kiev, express the spirit of resistance to tyranny. For these semiotic purposes, building big sends a message. The sculptures are unmistakable graphic warnings to wurst-eating, underdressed-for-winter invaders approaching from the west.

So what are we trying to say by building the world’s largest image of abstract grief? “Watch out, world: NOBODY is as sad as Canada”? You speak of tradition, but Mom² has no connection to anything in our heritage or our lexicon of symbols. Canada has never been characterized in poetry or propaganda as a “motherland”, and it is not now. That clashes awkwardly with having actual living women be the supreme embodiment of the state, which has been the case throughout most of Canada’s history since Confederation.

If you asked our war dead to point to the “mother country” on a map, 99 out of 100 of them would jab at a little archipelago just off the shore of France. They were to a man proud of Canada and of being Canadian, but they would not understand we are trying to do here. They would say they saw stuff like this for the first time in the places where they went to fight.

Chris Selley: True enough, it isn’t really Colby I should be arguing with; we agree on much. Along with being hilarious, Colby’s column distinguished itself from much other commentary by focusing on the facts in evidence, rather than taking it as read this is some kind of politically motivated stunt by Stephen Harper. But Heather Mallick blocked me on Twitter, so here we are.

Nothing in Colby’s original piece, or above, has convinced me that there’s anything historically incorrect about the project, or any shame in liking the basic concept — a personification of Canada, gazing mournfully towards another in Europe — which I do. To build another war memorial is not to suggest we have memorialized insufficiently or inappropriately thus far, and to support the basic idea is not to say it is the best manner of remembrance or that it should be a priority for donors or Parks Canada or anyone else. (NDP MP Peter Stoffer has threatened to withdraw his support as a patron of the war memorial if it is not built with private money — in a national park, mind you. Interesting times we live in.)

Is Mother Canada historically ignorant? Not the Anglo-Saxon way of doing things? Maybe, although we Anglo-Saxons have been known to depart from it: the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and the ANZAC Memorial in Sydney aren’t what you’d call understated — and then there’s Vimy, which is the subject at hand. If Allward’s colossus had not been sitting there atop 15,000 tonnes of concrete in the Pas-de-Calais for 80 years, and well-liked by Canadians, then it would be easier to think of Mother Canada as bizarre. As it has been sitting there, all this talk of historical illiteracy seems excessive. It is explicitly a link to our most famous existing memorial.

It would be interesting to gauge the reaction if organizers downshifted to a statue, say, half the size. I suspect the outrage would not shrink to fit. It was interesting watching people on Twitter react appreciatively to Colby’s column, especially the idea of Ma Canada donning a backpack with a Canadian flag on it to make it clear this is all some kind of “pose for old Europe.” It was all about how mortifying it all is, how un-Canadian (or how quintessentially Canadian, with a roll of the eyes) and — as I say — how something big must have changed in our national character to allow such a monstrosity even to get off the ground.

Call it Tall Mommy Syndrome.

If Mother Canada displays Canadians’ “stunted historical consciousness, our infinite self-satisfaction, our childlike craving to be seen by the world,” as Cosh suggests — and the more I think about it, the less sure I am about that — then many of his Tweeps were evincing another related Canadian tendency: to catastrophize disagreements and worry that we’ll fall on our faces and wind up the subject of worldwide scorn and amusement. In short, the reaction to what can easily be seen as an excessively ambitious display of mourning reminds me of Canadians’ uneasy relationship with ambition in general. Call it Tall Mommy Syndrome.

Colby Cosh: Well, that’s an interesting take on Mother Canada, that it is a “link” to the popular existing memorial at Vimy. The Vimy Memorial would seem to follow my proposed stylistic prescriptions pretty well: it’s visually impressive, but the human figures attached to it are human-scaled, the original “Canada Bereft” being about 20 feet tall rather than 100. Have we decided we are so fond the Vimy Memorial so much that we are… building something totally different that quotes it awkwardly?

If that is the idea, I can’t say I like it any better. I would even be tempted to suggest that one of the things people instinctively appreciate about the Vimy Memorial is that it is not abusively literal. Are its great twin pylons a gate? A mountain pass? A war-damaged facade? No doubt it was a mistake to go for modernist ambiguity, instead of just putting up a enormous grieving woman visible from space.

Chris Selley: I don’t know how it’s possible to see it as anything other than a link to the popular existing memorial at Vimy ― one I wouldn’t go out of my way to promote, but which I quite like, as I’ve said. We share concerns about, ahem, scale. There’s no denying its gigantism; that Lewis MacKenzie was to protesting it’s “not even 20 per cent the height of the Statue of Liberty,” suggests a certain desperation ― especially since his math seems way off on Lady Liberty (46 metres). I suppose it’s true that we don’t generally go big in that way, but does that really mean we mustn’t?

That we must all shriek and fulminate and cover our ears and hide under the bed in embarrassment at an excessively large manifestation of collective grief? The reaction still doesn’t make sense to me. If the
Mother Canada imagineers haven’t made their case particularly well, I don’t think many of their opponents have done much better.

Conrad the raccoon, struck down in unknown circumstances at Yonge and Church and cruelly left to perish alone, had been removed to a pauper’s grave by the time I arrived to pay my respects. All that remained of the impromptu memorial were a few snuffed candles. I paused in reflection for a few moments and carried on. But we must not let the spirit of Conrad — the spirit of the raccoon — fade from our consciousness.

For too long, as a city, we have seen Procyon lotor, the common raccoon, as nothing more than an infester of attics, a poacher of garden vegetables, a worrier of household pets, a producer of ghastly nocturnal squeaks and shrieks, and a creator of nauseating sidewalk messes to be frantically cleaned up in our dressing gowns. I submit the Torontonian raccoons are much more than that. These citizens are you, they are me, they are all of us … but improved.

There is so much we can do in this great city, in this great province, yet so much we cannot: open a restaurant or bar in an area where the local councillor thinks there are already too many; play road hockey or skate on Grenadier Pond, while remaining fully compliant with the law; use an e-scooter, at any speed, in a bike lane; puff on an e-cigarette — to say nothing of an actual cigarette — on a patio, or in a car containing a child. There is so much we have, but so much we do not: retail liquor sales past 6 p.m. (at the latest) on Sundays, or at all on holidays; reliably available and pleasant taxi service at a reasonable cost, invariably payable by credit card; food trucks within 30 metres of a restaurant.

“We’re often so timid in this city,” Coun. Josh Colle lamented back in May, when city council somewhat relaxed food truck regulations. “Just let entrepreneurs do their business and give residents their choices.”

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Liam CaseyA makeshift crime scene is set up on Church Street, where a dead raccoon was found and left for over 13 hours before being picked up by a city worker in Toronto on Friday, July 10, 2015.

Indeed. Which brings us back to our raccoon friends. What do we think they make of that timidity, of our routine genuflection to city hall’s regulations and permit applications and bylaws? When the raccoons want something, they muster all their ingenuity, entrepreneurial spirit and persistence, and they reach out their nimble paws and they take it. The raccoons care not about your garbage sheds and your green bins and your bungee cords and your pets’ mental health. The raccoons are in it for the raccoons; the raccoons always win; and Conrad’s memory will only steel the raccoons’ resolve.

Would the raccoon unfurl his measuring tape before parking his food truck? Would the raccoon apply for a permit before using a city-owned fire pit, or heed the bylaw officer’s menaces whilst skating, or look around furtively before vaping? Would the raccoon call for a crackdown on Uber? Like hell the raccoon would — in essence he is the Uber of the small mammalian kingdom — and nor should we humans.

A pest? Pshaw. The raccoon is an inspiration. Conrad’s approach to life offers us nothing less than revolution, nothing less than the freedom we deserve, one overturned metaphorical green bin at a time. Let’s rise up, Toronto, and take what’s ours. And let’s be careful crossing the road.

The news that broadcasters Peter Mansbridge, Lisa LaFlamme and Lloyd Robertson are no longer honorary patrons of the Never Forgotten National Memorial Foundation (NFNMF) — that’s the outfit hoping to build a 24-metre colossus of “Mother Canada” in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, modelled after the forlorn figure atop Walter Seymour Allward’s Vimy Memorial — was the first I had heard of said foundation having any patrons at all. I assumed it was friendless. After all, various pundits and worthies have confidently assured us that the project is nothing but a monstrous testament to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s ideology, cynicism, bad taste and war fetish.

But the project has many distinguished patrons, as it turns out, among them former Liberal prime minister John Turner, former Liberal Quebec premier Jean Charest, former Liberal premier of New Brunswick Frank McKenna, current Liberal MP Mark Eyking and current New Democrat MP Peter Stoffer, to say nothing of the project’s very distinguished “ambassador,” retired major-general Lewis MacKenzie. Whatever would possess these people to attach their names to such a thing?

Now, to be fair, the prime minister doesn’t seem to have uttered a single word about the thing. But the narrative can easily survive such minor details. The minister responsible for Parks Canada, Leona Aglukkaq, has called it a “wonderful initiative.” Parks Canada has chipped in $100,000. And, well, there you have it. This “Dollywood-level grotesquerie,” this “kitsch glorification of war,” this “brutal megalith” reflective of a “bigger-is-better approach to art (that) is best left to Stalinist tyrants,” as some commentators have called it, is at its root a Harperian monstrosity. Not all of the commentary has been like that, but a lot of it has; and outside of Cape Breton, it’s been nearly uniformly and quite spectacularly negative.

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I’m not a fan of the project as a whole. I share many of the aesthetic and philosophical objections my colleague Colby Cosh raised in a terrific and hilarious column in these pages last week: this statue-woman is all out of scale with the one at Vimy that it evokes — and so large, Cosh plausibly suggests, that even the United States — land of Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty — would not nowadays tolerate it.

Features like the “Commemorative Ring of True Patriot Love” and “With Glowing Hearts National Sanctuary” are cringeworthy, as is talk of a gift shop and restaurants. Even if this were a plausible economic development project for struggling Cape Breton, economic development isn’t a terrific justification for honouring the fallen.

That said, I don’t think the statue itself deserves the kicking it’s getting.

It is, after all, an explicit shout-out to one of Canada’s few existing megaliths — the Vimy Memorial itself, which was by no means universally popular at the time of the design’s unveiling and for reasons that will sound familiar. Major General Garnet Hughes described it as merely “another enormous thing with steps and railings.” “I would not mind this edifice being erected if I had the contract,” he wrote, “but I do think it is (a) waste of money as well as being a tribute to vanity.”

Today the Vimy memorial is not universally revered, but it is revered by most.

Indeed, setting aside all the appropriate complaints, I think the basic idea here is rather lovely, and makes perfect symbolic sense: Mother Canada, looking east, lamenting that we could not bring the fallen home. Canada’s memorialization of the First World War has always included the physical transplantation of objects and people from the battlefields to Canada and vice versa — hence the battlefield crosses hanging in Canadian churches, the incorporation of broken glass in memorial windows, the broken marble column from Arras Cathedral in St. Paul’s Church in Toronto. Commander Arthur Currie was buried in Mount Royal Cemetery with soil from Vimy, Ypres and the Somme. Then there are the Canadian maple trees planted at Vimy and the thousands of Canadians who pilgrimaged there for the memorial’s unveiling in 1936 and rededication in 2007.

I’m not sure what Allward would think of the Cape Breton plan. But had he included a bereaved Mother Canada figure on the Canadian coastline gesturing sadly toward the one at Vimy, no doubt laboriously constructed from the same finicky Croatian limestone, I think it would be similarly revered today.

Cosh argues the Mother Canada plans “are disclosing aspects of Canada we do not always acknowledge: our stunted historical consciousness, our infinite self-satisfaction, our childlike craving to be seen by the world.” Perhaps they are (though it’s hard to believe many people are going to see this thing if it’s ever built). But the politically flavoured vitriol it has attracted seems bizarrely outsized for what is, quite apart from everything else, an effort to memorialize Canada’s fallen soldiers. I don’t think that says anything good about us either.

Coun. Michael Thompson’s attempts to thwart Andy Pringle’s reappointment to the Police Services Board, in favour of someone seen as more pro-reform in general and anti-carding specifically, came conclusively to naught at city council Thursday. Where once there seemed an outside chance Mayor John Tory might be in trouble with Pringle — his preferred appointment, a long-time friend and supporter who has been tipped as the next board chairman — in the end only 10 other councillors voted against it.

This was despite some fairly dramatic oratory. “He consistently rubber-stamped police actions, proposals and initiatives that were not in the best interest of the community,” Thompson said of Pringle, who was seen as a close ally of former police chief Bill Blair. He accused Pringle of being a “cheerleading squad” for police. Police board member Shelley Carroll, meanwhile, seemed close to tears, arguing the board’s deference to Blair’s carding policies “caused the community to erupt and be enraged at all of us.”

The debate erupted as the city is coming to grips with the death of Andrew Loku, shot by police on Sunday, allegedly within moments of officers arriving at the scene and who was reportedly armed only with a hammer. Thursday, a coalition of anti-racism groups demanded an immediate plan to address the overrepresentation of African Canadians at the business end of police violence.

It wasn’t just Pringle’s record on trial, of course, but the colour of his skin. Coun. Paula Fletcher, in particular, complained council far too rarely appoints women and people of colour to all its boards and committees. Twitter was alive with similar sentiment. And that’s inevitable at this point in the continuing discussion about the police-citizen relationship in this city.

It took a fairly extraordinary activist effort to get Tory, among many others, to change his mind about police routinely stopping people in the street and “asking” for information, and to at least insist upon proper documentation if and when it happens. People would be mad to take their feet off the gas at this point. The police are pretty good at pushing back against oversight.

If Tory is now of the mainstream on carding, he seems much less concerned than most modern politicians with being seen as inclusive. Booting Thompson off the police board — he was its only black member — in favour of himself was a bold manoeuvre, even before the carding issue hit the fan. You don’t need to be obsessed with inclusivity quotas to think it’s quite odd the police board of this city wouldn’t have a member of the black community sitting on it. It’s not about political correctness; it’s about representation for a large community with a terribly fractured relationship with police.

Tory sounded about as angry as he gets Thursday, dismissing Thompson and the other malcontents. “Let’s be honest about what this is really all about. This is about politics,” he thundered. But it’s not all about politics.

If the mayor is as determined as he says he is to tackle the carding issue, and other related issues, and if Pringle is as loyal to Tory as his detractors claim, then his reappointment needn’t be any obstacle to fixing the Toronto Police. To their credit, a lot of people have sincerely changed their minds about this over the years — including Thompson, incidentally, who once supported stopping young black men and frisking them for guns. It’ll be a bloody tough slog, but this police board can make progress if it wants to, whatever the skin colour of its members. But it’s perfectly reasonable to ask why the community currently at the centre of this discussion has no seat at the table.

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/toronto/chris-selley-opposing-andy-pringles-reappointment-to-police-board-isnt-just-politics/feed0stdPJT-MichaelThompson-1.jpgChris Selley: Court victory could be beginning of the end for UberX in Torontohttp://news.nationalpost.com/toronto/chris-selley-court-victory-could-be-beginning-of-the-end-for-uberx-in-toronto
http://news.nationalpost.com/toronto/chris-selley-court-victory-could-be-beginning-of-the-end-for-uberx-in-toronto#commentsWed, 08 Jul 2015 04:18:06 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=819384

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On Friday, Superior Court Justice Sean Dunphy denied Toronto’s application for an injunction against the UberX ride-sharing service, instead ruling the company is not covered by municipal bylaws.

Needless to say, this hasn’t changed anyone’s mind.

Monday’s summit between taxi people and Uber people, brokered by Mayor John Tory, reportedly ended in acrimony. On Tuesday Sam Moini, owner of HPM Taxi, warned he could make no guarantees of good cabbie behaviour in the absence of an immediate crackdown on UberX.

“At the end of the day, the frustration level … is at a peak,” he said. “They need enforcement, and they need it now. That’s the bottom line. If that doesn’t happen, who knows?”

When staunch taxi industry supporter (and vice-versa) Coun. Jim Karygiannis moved a motion — seconded by Tory — asking staff to report back on Uber at September’s council meeting, he said he had received assurances from Municipal Licensing & Standards executive director Tracey Cook that “enforcement will take place … immediately.”

In a city that fetishizes regulation as much as Toronto does, it’s a small miracle you can still summon an UberX driver. The question, now that council is seized with the matter, is: how long can it last? For fans of the service, optimism would be … optimistic.

First of all, it must be said Dunphy’s ruling is dizzyingly weird

First of all, it must be said Dunphy’s ruling is dizzyingly weird. A limousine is defined in regulations as “any automobile, other than a taxicab, … used for hire for the conveyance of passengers;” and a “limousine service company” is defined as “any … entity which accepts calls in any manner for booking, arranging or providing limousine transportation.”

That is very obviously what Uber is and does. But for reasons impossible to summarize here, Dunphy argues the Uber app doesn’t “accept calls in any manner.” If the ruling is appealed, it’s easy to imagine it being torn to shreds.

On the bright side for UberX and its fans, Karygiannis’s crackdown is almost certainly less than it appears. A Municipal Licensing & Standards spokesman says the department “will continue to investigate and enforce the city’s bylaws regarding unlicensed limousines (including UberX)” — which sounds like business as usual. And we have a mayor who has committed to find a place for Uber in the regulatory constellation. Karygiannis’s motion, to be debated at some point this week, asks staff “to review … new and emerging technologies” with a view to bringing them “into regulation as part of the city’s for-hire ground transportation network.”

That sounds good until you get to the part about “ensur(ing) a level playing field … with respect to commercial insurance, driver training, equality of fares and other licensing issues.”

“Equality of fares”? That would be the end of UberX right there. “Other licensing issues”? What, all 875,000 of them? Forget it. If a “level playing field” is the goal, with one exception, it should be pursued by ratcheting down taxi regulation, not ratcheting up Uber regulation. There is simply nothing the city does conspicuously better to regulate its taxis than Uber does regulating its rides.

The exception is insurance, which is a serious challenge. As I write this, there are hundreds of UberX drivers on the road with insurance that doesn’t cover carrying paying passengers, and the solution is not just a phone call away. Not many companies are even interested in insuring fleet taxi drivers, argues Philomena Comerford, head of insurance brokerage Baird MacGregor. It’s unclear any would be interested in covering UberX drivers even if city hall clutched them to its regulatory bosom. Changes to insurance regulations at the provincial level would likely be necessary, she argues — and that’s a possibility.

But in the meantime, the ease of bringing Uber in line with city regulations has almost certainly been overstated, and that would be true even if council were generally inclined toward novel, innovative, pro-market solutions. This council … isn’t. On Tuesday, Karygiannis spoke of “welcoming emerging technologies” and in literally the next breath argued, “We’re going to have to say: how many taxicabs does it take to serve Toronto? You cannot have 20,000 cars out there.” Huzzah for capitalism! On Twitter, left-wing councillor Gord Perks spoke of “piracy.”

Can the city council that gave us our stunted food truck scene, our micromanaged-into-oblivion food cart scene, our temporary control orders on new businesses on Ossington Avenue and Queen West, really be trusted to allow UberX to operate as its designers intended? Stranger things have happened, perhaps, but not many. There’s a very real chance Uber’s court victory will go down as the beginning of the end of the wonderful service it provides Torontonians. If history is any guide, council will regulate it into ash.

Metro Vancouver’s half-per cent transit tax having been thumpingly rejected in referendum results announced Thursday — 62 per cent said no — many transit-boosters are suggesting a plebiscite was the wrong way to go about it in the first place. You wouldn’t hold a referendum on hospital funding or other social essentials; why hold one on transit?

Others have suggested Vancouverites were simply underinformed. In a statement, the pro-transit group Move GTHA stressed the need for “more public education about the value of transit and active transportation … to secure support for dedicated revenue tools. This has also been the case in many American cities that voted ‘yes’ in … referendums.”

Maybe. But most people know what it’s like to be stuck in traffic, and most people know what it’s like to whiz past or underneath it. Other cities have approved such measures, as Move GTHA noted: in 2008, a supermajority of Los Angeles County voters approved a half-per cent transit tax for 30 years.

And Vancouverites have been pretty clear as to why they were voting no. In February Angus Reid asked for opinions on TransLink, Metro Vancouver’s much-derided regional transit authority: with a range of answers on offer from “very positive” to “very negative, TransLink is very broken and needs a complete overhaul,” 39 per cent chose the latter and only 12 per cent felt positively. Of five potential reasons for voting no, 61 per cent chose “TransLink can’t be trusted with the extra funds.”

That’s sobering news for those of us in Toronto who think the solution to our transit shortage is, basically, to take people’s money and build transit. John Tory largely abandoned that position, which he had espoused at Civic Action, when he threw in his hat for mayor; Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, too, jettisoned her “revenue tools.” And it’s not difficult at all to imagine a similar referendum (in a hypothetical Metro Toronto) coming to grief for the same reasons: go on Twitter whenever the Toronto Transit Commission suffers a serious meltdown and tell me otherwise. It is widely seen (unfairly, in my view) as genetically incompetent, both in day-to-day operations and project management, and the province (much more fairly, in my view) equally so.

I can hear the campaign now: “Can we really trust the government that (insert Liberal mismanagement scandal) to spend billions on transit properly? Can we trust Toronto city council to approve a project and stick with it?” I would have to answer “eek, maybe?” and “definitely not.”

That’s not to say opposition is entirely rational. Toronto wallows in defeatism with the best of them. Dramatic improvements are met less often with applause than with an “it’s about time.” But it must be said, the city is on a roll just now. On a glorious Friday morning I rode a nearly brand-new subway car to a brand-new platform at Union Station, with its strange and rather compelling public art installation. I poked around the shiny and airy new York Street GO concourse, and I hiked up to platform level to take in the magnificent new translucent train shed — a rare case where the real thing actually lives up to the renderings. When Union Station is finished and someone competent is hired to fix the outrageously bad signage — I’ve lived here most of my life and I didn’t know which way was up — it will be a proper gateway to the city.

From Union you can take the new UP Express to the airport — the impossible dream, realized. On Friday I took a brand-new streetcar west along a brand-new Queen’s Quay, hopped off at Harbourfront Centre and watched tourists gape at what over time has become a truly striking waterfront area that perfectly befits Toronto. No, it’s not Grant Park. But we’re not Chicago.

Those great things happened because we paid for them, even if despite ourselves. But if we want more great things to happen quicker, we’re going to need people to trust their money will be used responsibly and competently. Reminding ourselves of how far we’ve come thanks to past investments might help. But much like public transit in the Greater Toronto Area, trust in government is at crisis levels — for some bad reasons, but also for a lot of good ones, ranging all the way from e-Health to the Scarborough subway. I doubt you can bridge one trust gap without bridging the other — and there are no short cuts. Governments simply have to be better.

It would be some feat of contrarianism to defend the Conservatives’ much-discussed latest attack ad, which denounces Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s purported “response” to recent ISIL atrocities: drowning caged men in a swimming pool and executing a row of prisoners with explosive necklaces, each detailed in propaganda videos, still images of which appear at the beginning of the ad.

Tactically — and I suppose morally, if you’re into that sort of thing — it may well be a good rule of thumb not to use terrorist propaganda for political gain. And like most political ads, this one takes liberties with the truth. Trudeau wasn’t responding to those events specifically; CBC’s Terry Milewski never mentioned these murderous innovations, first reported earlier that day, during the June 23 interview with Trudeau that’s quoted in the ad.

That said, the ad scores a more incisive point against its target than most: against all odds, ISIL is plumbing new depths of depravity; Trudeau wants Canada to stop bombing ISIL; and when asked who he would bomb if not ISIL, Trudeau called the question “nonsensical.” It was not, and has not been, his finest performance.

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The Milewski interview is a case in point: A Liberal government would yank the CF-18s out of Kuwait, Trudeau told him, in favour of “more humanitarian aid” and “a role of Canada’s military that would be more of a training role behind the lines” — “something we’ve demonstrated tremendous ability at in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”

Milewski trenchantly noted that Trudeau was fresh off a speech vowing to improve relations with Washington; would withdrawing air power help? “What Washington wants is for Canada, like other nations, to engage fully in the conflict against ISIL,” Trudeau responded. “We need to be engaged as part of this coalition against these terrorists. We just have to do something that contributes the best we can.”

But why not train soldiers and provide humanitarian aid, in addition to a military contribution — as in Afghanistan? Is there something wrong with the bombing mission? On this question, Trudeau came tantalizingly close to something dramatic. “When Western troops get involved in combat … they don’t necessarily … lead to the kinds of outcomes people would responsibly like to see,” he told Milewski.

There’s no guarantee minding our own business wouldn’t make things worse, but, well, look at ISIL over there, drowning caged men in a swimming pool.

Well, no kidding. You don’t have to be an isolationist, or even all that pessimistic about the prospects of Western interventions in the Middle East, to observe that we haven’t given butting out much of a shot. There’s no guarantee minding our own business wouldn’t make things worse, but, well, look at ISIL over there, drowning caged men in a swimming pool. The position Trudeau seems to be flirting with here — no bombs, no soldiers except to train other soldiers — is a potentially defensible one, even if it’s very much not in keeping with Canadian or Liberal history.

But when Milewski put the very obvious question to Trudeau of why we have these jets if we’re not going to use them against ISIL — “if you don’t want to bomb a group as ghastly as (ISIL), when would you ever support real military action as opposed to training?” — Trudeau responded as quoted in the Conservative ad: “That’s a nonsensical question.”

And he went on: “The Liberal party has always, and I have always been, supportive of Canada standing up for its values and taking action when necessary. The question I have for this government, which has failed miserably to do this, is to demonstrate why the best mission for Canada is to participate in a bombing mission.… I truly believe that Canada has a tremendous role to play on the world stage, including with our military, but also around development and diplomacy.”

That sounds more like business as usual … just not against ISIL, for some reason.

The pithiest expression of Trudeau’s position seems to be, “we must engage ISIL; we have finite resources with which to do so; Canada should use them to train allied troops and help the victims.” The question is: why? Accepting that we’re pretty good at training soldiers and providing humanitarian aid, we’re also pretty good at dropping bombs on baddies. Why shouldn’t Canadian pilots perform that function as part of an overall mission that Trudeau says he supports?

There are philosophical reasons one might arrive at that position: there are those who simply think Canada is genetically undisposed towards violence, for example. But that’s not what Trudeau’s pitching. It’s hard to tell what he’s pitching. The 2015 election campaign will feature a dedicated foreign policy debate. Trudeau should aspire to perform better than he did with Milewski.

Mayor John Tory’s Executive Committee approved “expanded gaming” at Woodbine late on Canada Day Eve, subject, it hopes, to myriad conditions guaranteeing jobs and revenue and the provision of non-“gaming”-related entertainment.

Eventually, Woodbine Entertainment Group, the Ontario Lottery & Gaming Corp. (OLG) and Tory believe, the enormous undeveloped site will be home to hotels, restaurants, convention space and stages on which Carrot Top and the J. Geils Band can perform.

While we wait, if city council approves next week, we might see as many as 2,000 more “electronic gaming machines” (EGMs) in Rexdale, and as many as 2,400 “live gaming positions,” which is to say 300 tables with eight seats at each. City staff estimate that development would produce 400 new “direct gaming jobs,” 300 “indirect and induced jobs,” and 625 person years of construction jobs.

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That’s no small thing in a community where unemployment and poverty are above the city average. Polling by Ipsos in May found just 16 per cent of residents opposed “expanding gaming at Woodbine Racetrack,” whereas 50 per cent supported it and 33 per cent had “mixed feelings.”

Mixed feelings are appropriate. “Gaming” means gambling, just in case there’s any confusion: wagering on games of chance that are designed resolutely to favour the house. The executive committee having spent the morning approving an anti-poverty strategy, there was a certain irony in it later endorsing what is, antiseptic euphemisms aside, a regressive tax on the poor.

A 2013 study funded by the Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre (OPGRC) found 36 per cent of self-identified problem gamblers in the province had income under $20,000, versus 23 per cent of the general population. And a staff report before the executive neatly explained the moral dimension of the issue: research suggests there aren’t many problem gamblers in Ontario — perhaps one or two per cent of the population — and their numbers are declining. “Nevertheless, recent estimates indicate that Ontario problem gamblers currently account for 24 per cent of the revenue from government-sponsored gambling.”

That is, as the report suggests, “problematic.” And it’s hard to miss the fact that governments tend to embrace this revenue stream most enthusiastically at times of fiscal emergency born of their own problem gambling. The OLG’s modernization plan, under which gambling facilities are being competitively outsourced, is first and foremost a revenue-creation plan for Queen’s Park. And it may well help make a few people’s lives significantly worse.

All that said, the ship of moral purity has sailed. The Interprovincial Lottery Corp. was formed in 1976. There have been slot machines, which are famously addictive, at Woodbine for 15 years. And with its $2.1 billion remittance to the province in 2014, the OLG is even more important to the treasury than the Liquor Control Board of Ontario — another government business enterprise purveying an addictive, potentially life-destroying product for profit.

The OLG intends to expand gambling in the Greater Toronto Area and there are municipalities here willing to host it — some of them just as convenient to many Torontonians as Woodbine. City council can only score a symbolic blow against that. It could boast of being the only casino-free big city in the country, Coun. Joe Mihevc, chairman of the anti-gambling board of health, suggested to the executive committee.

As motivational speaker Matt Foley might say, that and a nickel will buy Rexdale a hot cup of jack squat. Even if councillors could strike a mighty blow against gambling in the GTA, they would need to weigh that against the jobs the Woodbine plan will create. As they can’t, the burden is greater. And anti-gambling councillors haven’t shouldered it well.

“Niagara Falls and Windsor did not develop in an economically sustainable and family-friendly way after they got casinos,” Mihevc told the Toronto Star. “Walk around there — the jobs are cash-your-cheque and exotic-dancer type jobs. They are frankly not going to lead to the long-term prosperity of Rexdale.”

Gambling is a rotten way for governments to make money, if you ask me. But that’s the province we live in

“The fact is it’s a declining industry, and these are not good jobs,” Coun. Joe Cressy sniffed Tuesday.

Well we can’t all be city councillors, can we? Caesars Windsor employs nearly 3,000 people, the Niagara casinos nearly 4,000 — none of them strippers. Woodbine as it stands employs 10 per cent of the Rexdale population, most in unionized jobs and not all in unskilled grunt work. People need to eat; people have to cook the food. If anything like the entertainment destination vision comes to pass, you’re looking at all kinds of great jobs.

“It’s a pretty narrow view,” Woodbine chief executive Jim Lawson said in an interview of the Mihevc-Cressy faction.

“We’ve lost so many manufacturing jobs. And there’s so many (potential) good jobs (at Woodbine): hotel manager, restaurant manager, shift managers. These are all highly skilled people.”

Indeed. Gambling is a rotten way for governments to make money, if you ask me. But that’s the province we live in. As such it would take some balls to look Woodbine, and its employees, both extant and potential, in the eye and tell them they can’t partner with Queen’s Park to provide a perfectly legal product on private land. Council should dismount its high horse and let this happen.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/posted-toronto/chris-selley-toronto-council-can-score-only-a-symbolic-blow-against-gambling-and-cost-hundreds-of-jobs/feed0stdOLG - EXPANSION AT OLG SLOTS AT WOODBINE RACETRACKChris Selley: Three-on-three overtime is an ‘innovation’ from a league that doesn’t care about its biggest fanshttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/chris-selley-three-on-three-overtime-is-an-innovation-from-a-league-that-doesnt-care-about-its-biggest-fans
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/chris-selley-three-on-three-overtime-is-an-innovation-from-a-league-that-doesnt-care-about-its-biggest-fans#commentsSat, 27 Jun 2015 13:00:43 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=811274

Colby Cosh talks sense in trying to soothe hockey traditionalists like Kelly McParland over the NHL’s move to three-on-three overtime — which is ridiculous — but he doesn’t really say where he stands on the issue at hand: on tie games per se, on overtime formats, and on the shootout. “I have never taken the view that experimentation with game conditions is inherently loathsome,” he writes — and I agree, though my level of contempt for three-on-three nears my level of contempt for the shootout, and the examples he uses don’t have much impact on me. I care so little about basketball (and its shot clock and three-pointer innovations) that it’s almost literally invisible and noiseless to me; innovation could make baseball more exciting, Cosh says — I think it’s perfect as it is; and cricket … well, cricket’s an interesting one.

It highlights a central, unique conundrum about the NHL: a great many of its teams compete in markets where almost nobody plays the game or is a lifelong fan of it.

“Entirely new versions of the sport have been devised to provide an alternative to multi-day Test matches that make convenient viewing for almost nobody,” Cosh writes. True enough, and all for the better: the recently concluded World Cup, which was terrific, used the one-day international format; a Twenty20 match can happen in an evening. But crucially, the multi-day Test format is very much alive and well: Pakistan and Sri Lanka are duelling in Colombo as I write; South Africa and Bangladesh kick off late next month; and England and Australia are about to begin the third Ashes tournament in two years.

If you want to watch a hockey game with ties, on the other hand, you’re all out of luck. The NHL has an absolute stranglehold on the North American club game, and if as expected it bows out of the Olympics, it will have a stranglehold on top-level international competition as well.

Cosh seems to be sanguine about this. “There is obviously an element of marketing in the way the NHL responded to [increasing number of ties],” he writes. “A hardcore hockey fan raised with the sport might be comfortable with a National Hockey League in which there were 500 tie games a season. But it is probably not optimum for the economic growth of a game already chronically struggling in some U.S. markets where hockey is not understood innately like a language.”

That makes perfect sense if you’re sanguine about the state of the league, which I’m not. It highlights a central, unique conundrum about the NHL: a great many of its teams compete in markets where almost nobody plays the game or is a lifelong fan of it — and the NHL seems bound and determined to increase that majority, with Las Vegas being seen as the dead cert next expansion destination.

Growing the game is a good idea. But the NHL is growing it in a way explicitly designed to grab and hold the attention of people who don’t currently give a crap about hockey, while the hardcore fans don’t get a say — hell, most of them don’t even have a hope of getting an NHL team in their city despite hockey fan populations vastly larger than the ones in Phoenix, Miami or Las Vegas. It is a ludicrous state of affairs. There is no solution at hand, and it is clearly pointless to complain. But like Kelly, I will continue to greet each of these farcical new “innovations” not with cool, analytical grace, but with righteous, impotent rage.

Thursday must have been a tough day for the Ontario Liberals. Last month we learned that certain key figures had refused to sign release forms for a behind-the-scenes documentary, titled Premier: The Unscripted Kathleen Wynne, and that it might therefore never be released. The Liberals cited lawyerly concerns related to footage they hadn’t seen. But “sources” told the Toronto Star that, “Wynne’s aides were alarmed by an apparent focus on the Liberals’ Sudbury byelection bribery scandal and were unhappy that dissident former Grit candidate Andrew Olivier was interviewed.”

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Alas, the Star got its grubby little hands on the documentary anyway. Now we know Wynne is seen “dispens(ing) campaign advice to a wide-eyed federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau”; that Wynne’s marriage to Jane Rounthwaite “is one of loving, equal partners who share a puckish sense of humour, a passion for politics and a quaint affinity for the 1950s sit-com I Love Lucy”; that Wynne comes off‎ “as a thoughtful and conscientious boss who treats staffers well and enjoys friendly relations with her cabinet colleagues”; and that “Rounthwaite comes across as a smart and savvy political operator fiercely loyal to her spouse.”

Roxana Spicer/TwitterDirector Roxana Spicer, who was commissioned to shoot a documentary about Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne.

Yee-ouch!

OK, I kid. That’s good press, not bad. But it all makes the truly interesting parts of the report even more so: it seems Wynne and Company were indeed worried about the Sudbury byelection bribery scandal and the ensuing police investigation. And you can understand why. Would-be candidate Olivier released tapes of a telephone conversation in which high-ranking Wynne aide Pat Sorbara and Sudbury Liberal bigwig Gerry Lougheed discussed him dropping out in favour of Glenn Thibeault, who had just defected from the federal New Democrats — and over the course of the conversation, certain “options” came up.

“We should have the broader discussion about that is it that you’d be most interested in doing,” said Sorbara, “whether it’s a full-time or a part-time job in a constituency office, whether it is appointments, supports or commissions, whether it is also going on the exec …”

They didn’t much care (or didn’t realize) that the actions caught on tape, even if legal, were by no means remotely salubrious.

To a mere unfrozen caveman voter, it sure sounded like they were throwing around public money on partisan business. The explanations the Liberals quickly offered were not particularly convincing, legally speaking: Lougheed claimed he couldn’t have offered Olivier a job because he wasn’t authorized to do so; and besides, the party said, Olivier already knew he was being bounced, so it couldn’t possibly have been bribery. And the vigour with which they declared themselves vindicated suggested they didn’t much care (or didn’t realize) that the actions caught on tape, even if legal, were by no means remotely salubrious.

Indeed, the funniest part of the Star’s account is that Wynne and Co. were confused that the media thought a police bribery investigation was such a big deal. Wynne “lash(es) out at the press for being ‘out to get’ her,” apparently, and “complains the media ‘just seem obsessed’ with the story. ‘That’s what makes me so mad,’ she fumes.”

“There are certain people in the press gallery who I just know are out to get me,” Wynne reportedly says. “I mean they just want to — not ‘they’ personally but their organization — just wants to bring me down. They can’t stand what I stand for and they are going to look for any way to make me look bad.

“And then there are others who are just more neutral, but there’s nobody who is standing in that press scrum who is there to make us look good or make us look like we’re doing the right thing.”

One hopes it’s true there’s no one in your average Queen’s Park press scrum “who is there to make (the Liberals) look good,” but I can think of one newspaper’s editorial page that performs that function about as well as any political party in a free society could hope for.

If anything, they should have an invincibility complex, not a persecution complex.

That the leader of the Ontario Liberals could think this way at this point in the party’s astonishing 12-year run of power — having regained a majority after the no-taxes pledge, the millions of dollars to ethnic groups with Liberal connections, the OLG fiasco, the e-Health debacle, the ORNGE catastrophe, the Caledonia sell-out, the skyrocketing energy bills and green energy shambles, Dalton McGuinty’s disgraceful exit and the $1 billion gas plant cancellations and subsequent cover-up and police investigation — is amazing. If anything, they should have an invincibility complex, not a persecution complex.

But I suppose the two aren’t mutually exclusive. If you’re constantly rewarded for doing the wrong thing, perhaps it’s difficult to appreciate the distinction between “what’s right” and “what we’re doing right now.” And then all those reporters really would start to look a bit crazed. It’s the sort of mindset that eventually brought down McGuinty, if not the Liberals. Even at this early point in Wynne’s tenure, it’s not hard to see her era ending in similar fashion.

National Post
cselley@nationalpost.com
Twitter.com/cselley

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/chris-selley-kathleen-wynne-should-have-an-invincibility-complex-not-a-persecution-complex/feed0stdKathleen Wynne;Roxana Spicer/TwitterChris Selley: As we sit with six new streetcars instead of 50, one must wonder why Bombardier’s bottom line is anything the TTC should care abouthttp://news.nationalpost.com/toronto/chris-selley-as-we-sit-with-six-new-streetcars-instead-of-50-one-must-wonder-why-bombardiers-bottom-line-is-anything-the-ttc-should-care-about
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It’s squeaky bum time for Bombardier, as Alex Ferguson might say. On Tuesday, the company’s Thunder Bay, Ont., contingent faced an in-person interrogation from Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) chairman Josh Colle and CEO Andy Byford on the matter of Toronto’s gaffe-plagued and long-delayed streetcar order: We should have 50 on the road, instead we have six.

On Wednesday, Colle expressed confidence the company’s labour and manufacturing woes were improving, but wouldn’t rule out exploring contractual remedies, or cancelling Bombardier’s option for additional vehicles, if deliveries didn’t quickly speed up. On Monday, the commission asked staff to examine the feasibility of sidelining Bombardier from future bids altogether.

That might sound good as a pressure tactic. But on streetcars, Bombardier has us at least partway over a barrel. Had we barred it from bidding on this order, the contract might well have gone to … nobody. Bombardier was one of only two companies interested in building streetcars to Toronto’s unique system specs (wacky gauge, tight turns) and willing to comply with the bid requirement for 25 per cent “Canadian content”; the other, Siemens, bid vastly higher.

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The Liberals adopted that 25 per cent rule provincially in 2008, and it is hardly unique among manufacturing jurisdictions. Quebec enforces the same threshold, and the United States a much higher one. In many cases, it needn’t be the end of the world. Assuming Toronto has forsaken the philosophy of former mayor David Miller, who considered it unthinkable not to sole-source subway train contracts to Bombardier, there should be at least a few bidders when next we get the wallet out: for more streetcars, for SmartTrack, for the Downtown Relief Line, whatever it is.

But the streetcar fiasco is a good moment to reflect. OK, we preserved jobs in Thunder Bay. But we don’t have the damn streetcars, and we’re left with far more tough talk than we have leverage.

If the bidding process for these streetcars wasn’t rigged in Bombardier’s favour, you can’t blame people for being suspicious. Skoda’s highly regarded 10T model was conveniently excluded because the TTC insisted on a 100 per cent low-floor model. (The 10T was 50 per cent low-floor; its successor is 100 per cent.) Siemens struggled with the Cancon requirement, and dropped out of the initial, aborted bidding process at the last minute. You certainly can’t say Toronto did everything possible to get the best deal — indeed, then-TTC chairman Adam Giambrone had hoped to aim for 50 per cent Cancon, and board member Glenn De Baeremaeker tried to have whole thing sole-sourced to Bombardier, all based on the premise that Thunder Bay will suffer if we don’t buy domestic, and that that’s the TTC’s business.

It is a maddeningly parochial, small-minded view masquerading as benevolence, and it’s not just confined to transit. Last year, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives warned that CETA, the Canada-Europe free trade deal, would turn all of government procurement on its ear: It would “substantially restrict the vast majority of provincial and municipal government bodies from using public spending as a catalyst for achieving other societal goals.”

When we negotiated the NAFTA, the U.S. and Mexico were ready to talk business regarding more open state and provincial and local procurement markets

Daniel Schwanen, vice-president, research, at the C.D. Howe Institute, agrees it’s a big change — but a positive one, inasmuch as Canadian firms now have reciprocal access to the enormous European procurement market. Indeed, even as Vancouver buys Canada Line trains from South Korea, and Metrolinx buys UP Express trains from Japan, and Edmonton buys LRT units from Germany, the vast majority of Bombardier’s business in Thunder Bay is domestic — in large part because it’s so tough to sell to our most obvious potential foreign customer.

“When we negotiated the NAFTA, the U.S. and Mexico were ready to talk business regarding more open state and provincial and local procurement markets,” says Schwanen. But Canadian provinces weren’t up for it. Schwanen suggests they were more amenable during the European negotiations precisely because their companies found themselves locked out of the U.S. market, and didn’t much like it.

In short, instead of imagining job losses in Thunder Bay, we could be imagining all the jobs freer trade might create there to serve foreign markets.

The punch line is that CETA exempts Ontario’s and Quebec’s domestic content rules. But it doesn’t chisel them in stone. And if it seems unlikely Queen’s Park would be willing to abandon it, the TTC could at least stop being part of the problem. Bombardier might well have won a totally open competition anyway, but its bottom line is none of the TTC’s business. The Thunder Bay plant is 926 kilometres as the crow flies from Toronto City Hall. The TTC’s business is the best vehicles at the best price. Period.